The Mets just announced that they’ve resigned slugging outfielder Yoenis Cespedes to a four-year deal worth $110 million bucks.
When the news broke, I thought it was a good move. Cespedes is coming off two years of excellent production at the plate, and he’s a reliable middle-of-the-order hitter who play corner outfield to a draw, and doesn’t totally embarrass himself in center. He’s thirty, but he’s been reasonably healthy, and four years isn’t a long contract. He’s hit well in the park, and he seems to like the team.
And I liked it for the Mets. If they didn’t resign Cespedes, they were looking to enter the 2017 season with a middle order of Asdrubal Cabrera, Neil Walker, and the Ghost of Curtis Granderson. Call me biased, but that doesn’t seem like a lineup that will strike fear in the hearts of opposing pitchers.
And the Mets should be looking to win games. They’ve made the playoffs two years in a row, and they certainly should be looking to compete in 2017 and 2018. Cespedes was their best offensive player last year, so it’s reasonable for the team to keep him.
I said all of this in our discussion board. Did you know we have a discussion board? It’s fun. Mostly we talk about politics and Waffle House. At least that’s my general sense of how things are going.
One reader, BarryBondsFan25, posted the following response:
True, the Mets did need a hitter but Dexter Fowler in my humble opinion was the better fit. Fowler in CF with Bruce and Granderson or Conforto on the corners. Both Bruce and Granderson come off the books after 2017 which would allow the Mets to take part in a bigger free agent class which includes JD Martinez, Lorenzo Cain, Brantley and Cargo.
My initial response….well, you can probably predict my initial response. I like Dexter Fowler a lot, but he’s not Yoenis Cespedes. If I’m a team looking to win baseball games, I want the big Cuban.
What about the money question?
T’aint my dough. Get the better player.
I thought, too, that the Mets already had players like Dexter Fowler.
Dexter Fowler is a prototypical leadoff hitter. He gets on-base, and can run decently, though he’s not a burner anymore. He can play a tough defensive position, but he’s on the wrong side of 30, and probably can’t be expected to play that position well. He walks ‘nuff, and strikes out too much.
Dexter Fowler is a lot like Curtis Granderson, the guy the Mets slotted in the leadoff spot for the first half of 2016. And Dexter Fowler is a lot like Jose Reyes, who was the Mets leadoff hitter over the second half. The Mets don’t need three leadoff hitters…they need a real hitter. The Mets needed a big name to slot into the #3 spot on the lineup card.
* * *
That’s bad sckeyence.
It’s not even science….it’s assumption. I assumed that Fowler was like Jose Reyes and Curtis Granderson because a) all three of them have similar skill sets, and b) all three players have hit leadoff for most of their careers.
I was looking at the Mets offense mostly through the lens of traditional lineup structures: speed and on-base guys at the top, good sluggers in the 3rd and 4th spots, and fill out the rest as you can. The Mets had their leadoff hitters in Grandy and Reyes. Asdrubal Cabrera was a logical #2. What the Mets really needed was a #3 hitter. No player on the club could match the production of an absent Cespedes, and there weren’t any better bats on the market. The Mets needed Cespedes, and they got him. Kudos. High-fives all around.
And then I remembered RER.
RER stands for Run Element Ratio. It’s a stat that Bill invented in one of his annual Abstracts, and one that I think about every two or three years, before forgetting all about it again.
Run Element Ratio attempts to give numerical weight to whether a player is better at starting trouble or finishing it. Phrased more simply, it tells you if you’re a better at starting off an inning, or wrapping it up.
The formula is simple:
(Stolen Bases + Walks) / (Total Bases – Hits)
The dividing line is 1.00. If a hitter has an RER above 1.00, he’s better at starting trouble than he is at finishing it. He’s good at getting himself on base, and he’s good at getting around the bases.
If a hitter is below 1.00, he’s better at finishing trouble: he’s better at getting other guys around the bases.
Let’s look at two examples:
Name
|
H
|
SB
|
BB
|
TB
|
RER
|
Rickey Henderson
|
3055
|
1406
|
2190
|
4588
|
2.35
|
Joe Carter
|
2184
|
231
|
527
|
3910
|
0.44
|
Rickey Henderson, the best leadoff hitter of all-time, posted an extremely high RER. Joe Carter, a low on-base power hitter who drove in an insane amount of runs, posted a rather low RER.
The metric doesn’t tell us who the better player is. Ron LeFlore has a higher RER than Harmon Killebrew, but that doesn’t mean that we should put the Tigers speedster in the Hall of Fame. It’s just a way to see what dimensions of offense a player contributes to for his team. Are they better at starting trouble, or finishing it?
If you look at the Mets as a team, they have a low RER. Their RER ranked 13th in the NL last year, ahead of just the Cardinals and the Rockies:
Tm
|
H
|
SB
|
BB
|
TB
|
Run Elem. Ratio
|
MIL
|
1299
|
181
|
599
|
2168
|
0.90
|
PIT
|
1426
|
110
|
561
|
2226
|
0.84
|
SFG
|
1437
|
79
|
572
|
2215
|
0.84
|
ATL
|
1404
|
75
|
502
|
2119
|
0.81
|
CHC
|
1409
|
66
|
656
|
2359
|
0.76
|
MIA
|
1460
|
71
|
447
|
2187
|
0.71
|
CIN
|
1403
|
139
|
452
|
2238
|
0.71
|
WSN
|
1403
|
121
|
536
|
2338
|
0.70
|
SDP
|
1275
|
125
|
449
|
2115
|
0.68
|
PHI
|
1305
|
96
|
424
|
2089
|
0.66
|
LAD
|
1376
|
45
|
525
|
2257
|
0.65
|
ARI
|
1479
|
137
|
463
|
2446
|
0.62
|
NYM
|
1342
|
42
|
517
|
2274
|
0.60
|
COL
|
1544
|
66
|
494
|
2568
|
0.55
|
STL
|
1415
|
35
|
526
|
2453
|
0.54
|
We shouldn't read too much into this. The Rockies scored more runs than any team in the NL last year, and the Cardinals finished 3rd in runs scored. Having a low team RER doesn’t mean that the offense is bad…it just means that the offense is crowded with hitters who finish trouble.
But I also don’t want to make nothing of this. I watched a fair number of Mets games last year, and one of the most distinct characteristics of their team was the inability of their hitters to just get rolling. This is anecdotal, but it seemed like the Mets lineup had a lot of trouble just stringing together baserunners. Even when they scored runs early, the offense never seemed able press. You’d see the opposing starter give up two or three runs in the first, and then follow that up with a string of easy innings. Suddenly we'd be the seventh, and the opposing pitcher who looked like garbage in the first would be notching a Quality Start.
You can see the problem by just looking at individual players: the Mets just didn’t have anyone to start trouble on a regular basis. Here are the guys with 150+ plate appearances last year:
Name
|
H
|
SB
|
BB
|
TB
|
RER
|
Yoenis Cespedes
|
134
|
3
|
51
|
254
|
0.45
|
Curtis Granderson
|
129
|
4
|
74
|
253
|
0.63
|
Asdrubal Cabrera
|
146
|
5
|
38
|
247
|
0.43
|
Neil Walker
|
116
|
3
|
42
|
196
|
0.56
|
Wilmer Flores
|
82
|
1
|
23
|
144
|
0.39
|
James Loney
|
91
|
0
|
16
|
136
|
0.36
|
Michael Conforto
|
67
|
2
|
36
|
126
|
0.64
|
Jose Reyes
|
68
|
9
|
23
|
113
|
0.71
|
Kelly Johnson
|
49
|
3
|
15
|
84
|
0.51
|
Travis d'Arnaud
|
62
|
0
|
19
|
81
|
1.00
|
Alejandro De Aza
|
48
|
4
|
26
|
75
|
1.11
|
Jay Bruce
|
37
|
0
|
17
|
66
|
0.59
|
Rene Rivera
|
41
|
0
|
16
|
63
|
0.73
|
Lucas Duda
|
35
|
0
|
15
|
63
|
0.54
|
David Wright
|
31
|
3
|
26
|
60
|
1.00
|
Juan Lagares
|
34
|
4
|
11
|
54
|
0.75
|
Kevin Plawecki
|
26
|
0
|
17
|
35
|
1.89
|
Ranked by total bases, you have to go all the way down to Travis d’Arnaud to find a player with an RER over 1.00. Among Mets regulars, only Jose Reyes (0.71) had an RER that was higher than the NL average (0.70).
* * *
I assumed that Dexter Fowler was a similar player to Reyes and Granderson. He’s not. Or, he wasn’t last year:
Name
|
H
|
SB
|
BB
|
TB
|
RER
|
Dexter Fowler
|
126
|
13
|
79
|
204
|
1.18
|
Jose Reyes
|
68
|
9
|
23
|
113
|
0.71
|
Curtis Granderson
|
129
|
4
|
74
|
253
|
0.63
|
Dexter Fowler was very good at starting trouble last year, as he has been throughout his career.
But Granderson and Reyes weren’t particularly good at starting trouble: they both posted RER’s that were comfortably below the 1.00 dividing line, and pretty close to the league average. The Mets had two players who looked like leadoff hitters, but weren’t all that great at getting the offense started.
This shows up in the Mets performance in the first innings of games: the Mets ranked 12th in first inning runs last year. Their optimal lineup just couldn’t get things started.
I want to be clear: I am not suggestiong that Dexter Fowler is a better player than Yoenis Cespedes: I do not expect Dexter Fowler to, say, out-WAR Yoenis Cespedes next year, or for the durations of their contracts.
But I do think we’ve fallen into a tendency to see things in one narrow way. Certainly, that’s what I did when I initially answered BBFan25’s comment about Dexter Fowler. I knew that Cespedes was a better player than Fowler, so I assumed that he would be a better player for the Mets.
I’m no longer certain of that. Cespedes is a better hitter, but his hitting gives the Mets more skills that they already have. He’s another hitter whose skills are firmly in the ‘finishing trouble’ side of the spectrum.
Dexter Fowler would give the Mets a player capable of starting trouble:
Name
|
H
|
SB
|
BB
|
TB
|
RER
|
Fowler
|
126
|
13
|
79
|
204
|
1.18
|
Cespedes
|
134
|
3
|
51
|
254
|
0.45
|
And in case you think that we’re relying too heavily on Fowler’s strong 2016 season, the three-year splits actually show a bigger gap between these two players:
Name
|
Years
|
H
|
SB
|
BB
|
TB
|
RER
|
Fowler
|
'14-16
|
395
|
44
|
229
|
622
|
1.20
|
Cespedes
|
'14-16
|
474
|
17
|
119
|
867
|
0.35
|
Again, I don’t want to imply that Dexter Fowler is a better player than Cespedes…that isn’t what Run Element Ratio measures. But Fowler does provide something that the Mets offense really lacks: a player capable of getting on and around the bases at a healthy clip. A player who can jumpstart an offense.
And I wonder if that matters more than having the best player.
We’ve been talking a bit about the way that statistics can blind us, and we’ve been talking about the difficulty of understanding a complex system (the ebbs and flows of a baseball team) through numbers. I mean, I think that’s what some of us are talking about. At the very least, those are subjects have been central to a lot of my thinking recently, and I think that Bill’s latest entries are at least near this terrain.
BBFan25’s comment about Fowler and Cespedes at least touch on these subjects. A lot of us think that Cespedes is the better player for the Mets because he is the better player, full-stop. What I would suggest is that those are actually very different questions, and I think that I’ve been mixing them up for a while.
Is Yoenis Cespedes a better baseball player than Dexter Fowler? Sure. Absolutely. I'm fine with that.
Is Yoenis Cespedes a better baseball player for the Mets than Dexter Fowler?
Eight hours ago, I would have said that the answer is still ‘yes.’ I was really quick to dismiss the possibility that Dexter Fowler might have more to contribute to the Mets than Yoenis Cespedes. Eight hours ago, I looked at the Mets lineup and thoughtthat their real weakness was a big bat to anchor the lineup.
Now I’m not sure of that. Now I think that the big absence in their lineup is a hitter who can reliably start the offense. And for all his talent, Yoenis Cespedes isn’t nearly as good at starting trouble as Dexter Fowler. Purely as hitters, I've come around to the idea that Fowler's abilities are more useful to the Mets team than the skills that Cespedes offers. Factor in secondary details like defense and cost, and I've come around to BBFan25's opinion.
Dexter Fowler was a better fit for the Mets team than Yoenis Cespedes.
Dave Fleming is a writer living in Wellington, New Zealand. He welcomes comments, questions, and suggestions here and at dfleming1986@yahoo.com.